On February 10, Channel 2, the CBS affiliate in New York,
aired a news segment which showed a Long Island family abusing rabbits who they
were raising for food. The home video showed, among other things, rabbits being
being repeatedly hit in the head with "karate chops," thrown to the family dog
who was encouraged to go after them and who bit them about the neck, and then
finally being dangled by the hind legs and skinned alive, while fully conscious
and screaming in agony. During all this, family members laughed and enjoyed
themselves.

While the raising of rabbits for meat is legal, the treatment
of the rabbits in the video is clearly illegal and grossly cruel. The video, for
instance, clearly showed a rabbit being skinned alive. The local authorities are
planning, as was reported by Long Island's Newsday, to charge the individuals
with one count of misdemeanor cruelty. How can this be possible? I urge you to
charge these individuals with felony cruelty to animals, and demand the harshest
possible sentence. A strong message needs to be sent out to the public that this
kind of cruelty cannot be tolerated in a civilized society, and that to condone
this cruelty, performed for entertainment, is the worst possible message that we
as a society can send.